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I was a crafty rascal when I had younger kids, and obsessed with sewing spinning and felting. I couldn’t contain that passion, so much of that fiber and sewing play happened when my kids were napping and playing quietly around me.

Growing up my mom was a seamstress. But the sewing bug for me didn’t hit until I had kids of my own. So when I was brainstorming ways to earn an income from home, I wanted to match passion for fibre arts, so I do what every crafty Mama seems to do out there… I opened an Etsy shop.

But the problem was when the kids went to bed and my need to get a good chunk of eight to nine hours sleep a night in order for me to functions properly, it started to become unsustainable. They were in bed and I would be there sewing and spinning until well into midnight sometimes.

I can sense that this was going to backfire on me on a physical level with a burnout or something, so I put my thinking cap on and I decided to offer some online e-courses on sewing.

That was my first taste of diversifying my income stream and this is what I recommend to you.

This might take some experimenting but what I discovered with my intention to scale my efforts was that e-courses were pretty awesome. I started one program called the Backwoods Mama’s Sew Camp. I know some of my followers still remember me from that offering and have only have just recently decided to work me one on one on a coaching level. But I digress.

The program I created was essentially a bunch of sewing patterns that were automatically available for download along with videos showing these Moms who felt that, now that they have kids, there was no time to sew, very much like what I felt.

But I picked up a couple of Jedi mind tricks that I was able to share with these women who purchased the e-course and upon purchasing, they gained access to these sewing patterns for a Backwoods Mama wardrobe along with these videos that walk them through the baby steps to create these outfits.

The tricks I shared with them was mostly coaching unbeknownst to me. I kept encouraging them through the videos that even if you only have five minute because before the toddler wakes up from a nap, you can do this. Just break it up into baby steps.

Another coaching tool I was offering was the releasing of perfection because I remember back when my Mom tried teaching me sewing, I think a big part of the reason I was turned off at sewing is that she is a perfectionist and I would try to make something and she would just look me in the eye and say, “This is crooked,” and she would rip up the seams along with my heart. The seam ripper, in front of me. Yeah, it was a little traumatizing but I think that was important. It’s like, “It’s going to be good from far but far from good,” and that’s all right.

One of the takeaways for me from creating an e-course as a fiber artist was:

It’s really important to diversify your income streams

Just creating products and selling them alone isn’t sustainable on a financial or physical level.

As well, I discovered that there’s more than I what I was showing these Mamas. It’s more than, “Here, you can make these yourself.” It was deeper than that and it was so fulfilling. They would send me photos of themselves wearing their cute little frocks and bloomers and I felt that I was really almost creating these minions. I’m just kidding and we’re all dressed the same … It was just really fulfilling in ways that’s really hard to describe.

Gawd! Aren’t they the cute?!!!

As a fiber artist, to diversify your income streams does entail a little bit of experimenting.

Write an ebook.

Share a little bit about your process. Think about who it is that if you were to coach, that you would want to work with.

Perhaps, there are other fiber artists just like in the coaching path, who are just a couple of steps behind you and then, you can hold their hand and teach them some of those tricks you got yup your sleeves. Perhaps, it could be practical tricks and skill sets, but then, as you start writing about it, you might start noticing, “Huh, it goes a little bit deeper here.”

If right away when I said writing about it, you felt some resistance like, “Ugh, that you don’t have to write.” You can make videos and record yourself talking about your process and then, have it transcribed and turn that into an eBook.

Create an ecourse.

But what I recommend more than a eBook is go that route with an e-course because the truth is it isn’t that much more effort than in the eBook.

The e-course, it’s an eBook essentially but you put in really short bursts of videos, three to five minute videos, just talking a little bit about what you wrote for that lesson, a worksheet, it could be a simple worksheet you create in Google docs and then save it as a PDF and then you could package it and there you have an e-course.

Offering coaching services.

Then, through that exercise, you can get a conversation going with your customers and then eventually, organically, it’s going to come to the surface, an opportunity here to start offering coaching. It’s very simple with a couple of coaching tools under your belt that you could create an upsell in your e-courseto score some one-on-one coaching time with you to aid in the creative process.

Put your intention out there to help in a way that’s related to the bliss that is the creative process.

Don’t overthink it too much and you just will see that, as you put the intention out there, you take the steps towards creating an offering, towards creating different income streams, to challenging yourself to go a little bit deeper to be of service to the ones that you want to beautify and enrich their lives and then you start connecting with your community out there.

And then it’ll be revealed how you can offer coaching services in a really powerful and intimate way.

This is the work I do with my clients. As your personal coaching trainer and mentor, I’ll help you break the cycle of burning yourself up creating items simply to stock up your Etsy shop for minimum wage and help you start connecting with your customers on a deeper level while getting paid more handsomely.

If you are so TIRED of figuring all this out on your own, we should work together.

Go here to learn more about Creative Bliss Coaching Academy – a year long group coaching training program I created to help creatives like you actually learn how to coach in a way that is aligned with their creative bliss.

P.S — This is only for people who are FED up with depleting themselves experimenting with ways to earn an income from their passions and are READY to do the work and make the changes that need to be made to turn their creative bliss into a coaching biz. Take a breath and check in. Are you ready to offer coaching services? If so, click here. I want to talk to you!